EastWest

The installation was a real nightmare of several apps, registrations, several passwords, iLok, terms and conditions—completely disproportionate to what installing a plugin should be. I ended up exhausted.

Then the sound didn't quite convince me, but the graphical interface is well structured and has some interesting tools. Some sounds actually do sound good—for example, some pianos sound great—but many others have background noise. Shhhh.

Then Goliath kept crashing Studio One over and over again, until I finally uninstalled it just a few hores after purchase.

Wasted money.

I have and utilize every one of the EastWest libraries. This was the only one I was missing, and it is every bit as good as all the others. The sounds are spot-on and the guitars are excellent! I use these libraries playing live.

A bit outdated, I think it was released in 2007. This is noticeable in several ways, but especially around nuance. What was top of the line almost 20 years ago feels old-fashioned today, especially when it comes to the nuances of music. A lot has happened since 2007 and it's noticeable that time hasn't stood still when using functions from newer libraries...

The quality between different sounds is also somewhat uneven, especially when it comes to dynamics. The three accordions are good - dynamics and nuances play less of a role there. For cimbalom and guitars, the age is somewhat noticeable, OK but not much more. Very good function in a mix, but hardly a solo instrument. Same goes for the violin.

On the positive side, the Opus engine is unusually low on CPU and GPU resource on a modern computer, so many of the sounds in Gypsy can be great starting points for experimentation.

Quite affordable as "bread and butter for European traditional music" on a sale price but hardly at full price. I think East-West would benefit from either making fairly radical updates to its older libraries or ensuring that prices are always lower to attract customers to its more modern libraries. East-West has the option to do a trial subscription for all products where you can fill a larger hard drive. Then you can pick the icing on the cake for the libraries you really need. That's good.

Not "quite" the way the ad represents leading user to think "just type it in" for words the choir sings, but in reality doesn't even seem like phonics, more like code... Whatever the case, it's my first impression, and to be sure, I need to spend time IN the manual and the software and with diligence, I'm looking forward to getting expected results as "advertised", at such point I'll amend the 3star.

Simply the best in class Choir library on the market with the best word builder ever made, most close to real human choir than any other choir VST out there.

This was the biggest (and it is huge) disappointment of any orchestral library I've anticipated as much as I did this one. I'll start amassing all the broken bits of these sample sets and maybe someday I'll post a more complete review. For now, suffice it to say that in the days I've had to explore this library, I don't see myself using it as more than a layer with a much better sample set and engine.

This library is huge. Even with fast fibre internet, it took nearly a day to download it all. Theoretically, you can download just the sounds you want to use, but I did not take the time to figure this out.

Opus engine had huge promise, but so far I have not had enough time to see if it delivers anything. Given the lackluster options within the libraries, I may never take the time to know.

Some of the so-called articulations sound like the main samples were just edited with EQ and such. For example, the strings that have flautando (18 violins does, but many of them do not) sound like a variation on the con sordino. I could not make any sense of why some instruments had many articulations and others had only long and staccato. For my arranging, there are so many missing articulations that this could never be my main library even if I liked it more.

This is my first reverb plugin that i have bought. I wanted something that was easy to use, and something that had a lot of presets/locations. We do a lot of church and gospel music, so i wanted presets that were recorded in churches and cathedrals. And wow this plugin didn't disappoint.

The presets sounds very natural. They sound real and like you actually are in these locations. No one could tell we had added artificial reverb to our recordings. I adjusted them a little bit to get the perfect amount.

There are over a thousand different presets for different scenarios. Instrument specific reverb and vocal specific reverb and lots more. So i haven't been able to try all of them, but i guess that's not the point either. They will be there when i need them, and whatever i'm recording.

I'm all in all very satisfied. This gave me everything i wanted from a reverb plugin, so it's 5 stars from me. It is a little expensive, but i guess that can be said for most plugins. I'm sure the spent a lot of time and effort creating this plugin.

great sounds, really good engine.

the orchestrator is very powerful and can inspire you to play things you'd probably rarely think of.

only problem is the download process as you need more than a terabyte to install everything so if you want to place everything on a single 1tb ssd, you'll need to use another disk in the process and copy and paste stuff but it's not such a big deal-provided you have space.